This volume depicts the world of a preacher, cabbalist, and biblical exegete who lived during the expulsions from Spain and Portugal. His literary works and thought are analyzed and put in their proper cultural and historical context.

This volume depicts the world of a preacher, cabbalist, and biblical exegete who lived during the expulsions from Spain and Portugal. His literary works and thought are analyzed and put in their proper cultural and historical context.

Several years ago an international conference was held at the University of California to honor Professor William Brinner, whose personal scholarship throughout the years has focused on both the Jewish and Muslim historical, cultural, and intellectual experiences. This volume, which consists of the works of many of the conference participants, is a collection of essays that deal with the interaction of Judaism and Islam over history from different perspectives. The book is divided into nine parts: introduction, overview, Jewish-Muslim interaction in medieval times, Jewish-Muslim interaction in modern times, Bible and Qur'ān, law, philosophy and ethics, sectarian communities, and language, linguistics and literature. As a resolution the Arab-Israeli conflict slowly edges forward, we believe that this publication will serve the purposes of both serious scholarship and better cultural understanding.

The first study on the subject, this is a bibliographical work on individual tractates published in the first half of the eighteenth-century, and the circumstances of their publication. Included are numerous reproductions of title and representative pages.

The book discusses the image of the prophet and the role of prophecy in Modern Hebrew Poetry. The first part of the book presents the prophetic archetypal biographies of prophets, heroes and artists in Hebrew and European mythologies. It also examines the historical facts which lead to the departure of the prophet from Hebrew literature following the destruction of the second temple. Finally, it addresses the necessity of reappearance of the prophet in the 18th and 19th centuries in Hebrew thought and literature and provides a short history of that reappearance in Haskala literature. The second part focuses upon three major “prophets poets”: Haim N. Bialik, Avraham Shlonski and Uri Z. Greenberg. The book may be of interest to scholars of Literature, Judaism, Philosophy, Science of Religion, Anthropology, Folklore and Rhetoric.

This major new contribution to the history of women examines the special status accorded to women in the Jewish communities of the Eastern Mediterranean provinces of the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period. Topics examined include their daily life and the social norms governing them, polygamy, divorce, child marriage, and the position of female slaves. Based on a detailed analysis of Hebrew and Arabic manuscript sources, legal and other, this first study of the subject in English opens up an almost unknown world of women to the modern researcher.

Medieval Jewish literature from the 10th century onwards drew heavily on Arabic literary models. This important new study discusses the impact of Arabic literature on Jewish literature and medieval Jewish culture.

This book deals with the intricate, and often uneasy relationship which developed between Jews and Venetians, as they struggled to cope with the changing realities of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean world. The fruit of many years of research in the Venetian archives, this volume explores undiscovered aspects of Mediterranean history regarding the involvement of Venetians and Jews in the international maritime trade, Venetian attitudes towards Jews, the impact of Venetian-Ottoman contention on the relationship between Jews and Venetians, and more. The unfolding of this relationship reveals new perspectives on the history of sixteenth-century Venice, on the social and economic history of the Jews, and on the history of the Ottoman Empire in its prime.

The main focus of this book is the study of Abraham Ibn Ezra’s (1089-1167) scientific thought within the historical and cultural context of his times. His scientific contribution may be understood as the very embodiment of ‘the rise of medieval Hebrew science’, a process in which Jewish scholars gradually adopted the holy tongue as a vehicle to express secular and scientific ideas. The first part provides a comprehensive picture of Ibn Ezra’s scientific corpus. The second part studies his linguistic strategy. The third and fourth parts study Ibn Ezra’s introductions to his scientific treatises and the fifth part is devoted to studying four ‘encounters’ with Claudius Ptolemy, the main scientific character featuring in Ibn Ezra’s literary work.

Marriage Rituals Italian Style: A Historical Anthropological Perspective on Early Modern Italian Jews is the first comprehensive attempt to present the wealth of primary documents relating to marriage rituals in Jewish Italian communities - responsa, private letters, court protocols, defamating books, love stories, material objects - and place them in historical context. The book traces the chronological course of different phases of marriage (matchmaking, betrothal, the wedding day), and also adopts a thematic perspective. Marriage rituals mirror key issues in local Jewish culture: family life, gender, the youth sub-culture, sexuality, the uses of property, and the honor ethos. Jewish marriage rituals in Italy are revealed as surprisingly similar to those of their Catholic neighbors, and undergo similar change process.